Dream Your School UK
Dream Your School – Brighton took place at Brighton’s Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts on 27 February 2017. It was organized by our UK partner, ONCA, a local charity with a gallery and performance space whose mission is to inspire positive action that responds to current cultural and environmental urgencies through arts and creativity.
Supported by experienced facilitators, over 100 participants spent the day sharing tools for learning and creativity, and generating new ideas for educational policy and practice. This intergenerational, interdisciplinary event engaged learners aged six and up, including students and emerging educators, professional educators and people working in education policy, parents, and others passionate or curious about good practice in learning and education.
Building the dream school
Creative methods and approaches were used to engage with questions around learning and education. Participants used a variety of techniques involving kinaesthetic learning, such as building their dream school from Lego and plasticine, group poetry writing to envision their ideal learning environment, improvisation sessions to practice social skills, cooking together to learn about different cultures, and outdoor explorations to stimulate scientific thinking.
Proposals urging greater autonomy for learners and teachers included ways to support teachers to follow their passions as educators, and ways to develop, listen to and celebrate learners’ critical thinking, choice and independent enquiry. There was much enthusiasm for the idea of schools embedding in their curricula practices such as philosophy, mindfulness, democracy, peace studies, debate and deep listening. University of Sussex students held a session on decolonizing education, in matters such as history or gender issues, inviting the participants to question how educational contents and teaching practices could represent the plurality of knowledge in our society.
A team of young reporters followed the participants throughout to collect information for a newspaper featuring the proposals and ideas for the future of learning. It has been printed and shared among the broader public and policymakers.
More information:
Read the Dream Your School newspaper here.
Short film of the day:
Read more about the event here.